Page:Talbot Mundy - Eye of Zeitoon.djvu/224

206 building, gutted by fire. Twenty yards away from it, on top of the same round hill, strange fruit was hanging from a larger oak than any we had seen thereabouts—fruit that swung unseemly in the tainted wind.

"Turks!" announced one of Kagig's men, riding up to brag to us. "That square building is the guard-house for the zaptich, put there by the government to keep check on robbers. They are the worst robbers!"

The man spoke English with the usual mission-school air suggestive of underdone pie. As a rule they go to school at such great sacrifice, and then so limited for funds, that they have to get by heart three times the amount an ordinary, undriven youth can learn in the allotted time. But by heart they have it. And like the pie they call to mind, only the surface of their talk is pale. Because their heart is in the thing, they understand.

"By hanging Turkish police," said Fred, "you only give the Turks a good excuse for murdering your friends."

"Come!" said the man of Zeitoon. "See."

He led the way down a path between young trees to a clearing where a swift stream gamboled in the sun. Down at the end of it, where the grass sloped gently upward toward the flanks of a great rock was a little row of graves with a cross made of sticks at the head of each—clearly not Turkish graves.

"Three men—eleven women," our guide said simply.

"You mean that the Turkish police—"

"There were fifteen on their way to Zeitoon. One survived, and reached Zeitoon, and told. Then he died, and we rode down to avenge them all. The Turks took the three men and beat them on the feet with sticks until the